Jay's Pawn Shop
Midtown East, ManhattanIt'd taken an agonizing 43 minutes to reach the store - already a miracle by late-night, Queens-to-Midtown standards, but still not quite as miraculous as Kamala could have pulled off. It would have been faster,
better to run there. But if Jersey City was still adjusting to the occasional twenty-foot teen sighting, well...Manhattan wasn't going to stand for it anytime soon.
Kamala was half hoping, half terrified it'd all be done and over in the worst way by the time she reached her destination. And maybe it would be better that way. Maybe she'd heard the name wrong, or the address. Maybe none of this had anything to do with her anyway, and she was paranoid and bored and restless after too long spend at home, hero-ing in the boring, RA way, instead of...well, the alternative.
And, really, was this even her business? JC was one thing, at least people sort of knew her there. She had neighbors, she had a neighborhood to look out for. Here...it was like every block with a Starbucks or bodega had a caped crusader or six marking his or her territory, and if that was the case, Kamala was way,
way out of bounds.
But.
But even if this wasn't Jersey City, this
was Jay's. This was Vince. This was
Bruno.
She hadn't spoken to her best friend almost since Josh had died -- the night he'd told her he was leaving notwithstanding -- but it didn't mean she'd ever stopped thinking about him. They'd always been close, and even closer after she'd become Ms. Marvel, and subsequently gotten his little brother Vince out of some seriously weird trouble.
She hated to think he might have found himself back in a mess, but more than that...she hated to think what Bruno would say if she let someone else he loved die.
So. Queens to Manhattan, and now...now to find a way into the pawn shop. Kamala thought it was weird that there could be so many police cars with so little noise, but maybe no one really worried about stuff like this so far from the UES.
In any case, crashing a heist was a hell of a lot easier than crossing the bridge. Being unrecognizable, even in a cowl and mask, had its bonuses. Being two inches tall, though, was even better. Dodging flashes of red and blue light for the safety of the shadows, Kamala skirted the outside of the building, pushed in through the conjoined (though now vacated) bodega cat door, and ducked behind the counter of the pawn shop for as long as it took her to get her bearings.
It took her about that long to realize why everything seemed way quieter than it should have been.
---
The hostage situation...wasn't. Or at least not in anyway she could tell. Definitely a
situation, but hostage? Not so much. Outside, she could hear police sirens and vague, occasional mutterings through a bullhorn. Inside, the radio had been turned down just enough to hear the latest mumble-rap crackling under Vince's voice.
Any relief she might have felt that he was alive, though, was short-lived.
Vince didn't sound scared, or even all that concerned. He was bargaining, yeah, sure. Any good pawn shop employee was
always doing that, but given what she'd seen, heard on the news, in the grisly scenes she'd been replaying in her head for the last hour, she'd have guessed bargaining with his life, and whatever was left in the cash box before the shop closed for the night.
This? This was not that. Without a sound, Kamala felt herself stretch back into something closer to normal seventeen-year-old size, though she didn't leave her place crouched behind the glass cases of bowie knives and gold watches just yet.
"C'mon, dude, you don't even know what it fucking is, just give it to me."
That was Vince, and then in response to him, a laugh Kamala thought sounded sort of slurred, if that was a thing.
"Don' need to know what it is to know't matters to you." The second voice was unfamiliar...mostly. She couldn't have named the speaker if she'd tried, and yet for some reason, she couldn't help but feel she ought to know him. "Somethin' big, too, or you'd'a let the p'lice in by now."
"Still time," Vince fired back, though he sounded uncertain. "They got guns, man, and your face is on cameras. They could shoot you. They could
kill you."
"Faster'n I could kill you?"
Kamala moved without thinking. Again. It was a bad habit her new reflexes were making much worse. She was lucky her newfound flexibility came with built-in damage repair.
Two injured, one dead, the news had reported. And Vince's...customer, as it were, was right -- if the police hadn't stormed the building yet, there was probably a reason why.
But for now, there was only Vince, the the barrel of the gun pointed at his chest.
"Vince,
move!" Kamala demand-shrieked as she lurched bodily from her hiding space.
Later, she wasn't quite sure what happened after that, only that it had happened impossibly fast.
At the same time her club of a malformed hand wrapped around the gun's muzzle, Kamala saw a new figure, pale, hulking, crouched by the door, shaking, suddenly straighten to an impressive height, even by her standards.
In front of her, both Vince and his friend turned to look at her, equal parts surprised and confused. The friend recovered faster, whipped a shadowy something behind his back, and fired his gun with his other hand.
And somewhere behind her, one of the glass display cases exploded, throwing a shower of glittering, crystalline shards into the air, each catching in a halo of flashing police lights to paint purple diamonds on the walls between new drops of blood.
Little Bill
